Free-Floating Bones
I.
Loose ligaments,
free-floating bones,
joints sliding out of place
at the slightest movement.
Muscles both tight and weak—
exhausted by the effort
of trying to hold everything together.
Not the job they were designed for.
The mystery of my body
and its intricate web of pain.
I’ve long stopped wondering,
learning instead to accept without knowing,
to adapt without understanding.
II.
Finally.
A chance call to a PT
and I now have a name for it.
After forty-seven years of so many
disparate, inexplicable symptoms
affecting every system in my body—
something that connects them all together.
Not myriad, but one.
Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome,
a genetic connective tissue disorder.
Still mysterious,
the specific gene mutation not yet found,
but something I can hang onto.
A little less free-floating.
III.
The body’s a metaphor;
I now have a starting place for healing.
I map out wounds to connection
in my paternal lineage.
Latvian Jews fleeing for their lives,
severed from home and loved ones.
Free-falling in a new land,
starting from scratch.
And in my own history:
early experiences with unexpected deaths,
starting with Dad’s when I’m eight,
And—after a string of teachers, relatives, family friends—
marked by Mom’s at the other end, when I’m twenty-five.
Each parent died of a sudden heart attack.
Hearts broken from the pain of living.
I’m a quarter of a century young.
Untethered. Unmoored.
Crash landing into adulthood with no safety net,
no landing pad—
rented apartment we’ve lived in seventeen years
emptied of all traces of us.
Of her.
Grief. Deep aloneness. Overwhelm.
My free-floating bones
match my inner world.
IV.
Fast forward twenty-two years.
In meditation
I stretch beyond time, space and matter
feel my body dissolve into that realm
of being-ness,
where there is no separation.
No,
I.
No pain.
Golden healing energy
surrounds me and my ancestors
(and my boundary-less bones)
with boundless love.
We’re held
We’re supported.
We belong.
Free-floating into oneness.